Droidnaught is my procedurally generated first-person sci-fi dungeon crawler inspired by classics of the genre such as Captive, Hired Guns and Dungeon Master, combined with modern survival horror themes and roguelike elements.

When a deep space exploration sleeper ship goes silent hundreds of lightyears into its mission, controllers on Earth awaken a group of maintenance droids onboard in order to investigate what went wrong.

Developed as a solo project, it will eventually be built for Windows, Mac OS and Linux, with iOS/Android as a further milestone if there is enough interest.

Is it more of a roguelike or more of an RPG? As in - is there permadeath or is it more of an RPG with procedural dungeon levels?

It started off life as a turnbased 3d roguelike. But I felt that trying to generate a sense of dread when things can't sneak up on you in realtime was rather difficult. That said, it has the dungeon-carving, pathing and Field-of-view systems of a roguelike.

re: Permadeath. It's something I'd love to be able to include. My current design plan is to generate a whole colossal ship on new game creation, and have the droids make their way through all the various levels, enemies, traps, puzzles, etc to its ultimate conclusion. This would probably lend itself to permadeath nicely.

UPDATE: Main menu, New game and Save/Resume are now implemented - which then makes it possible to implement the Permadeath/Hardcore style modes.

Savegame structure currently looks a little like this:

- World random seed (The entire map can be recreated from just the seed)- Player group and all enemy group details(Health, energy, inventories, positions, etc.)- Map discovery details(Where has the player group already been?)- Door open states- Items on the ground

For a 1 floor 32x32 map, the save size is around 6kb.

World gen and save loading currently takes just a couple of seconds. This will get longer as the ship starts to get more complicated.

The current plan is to allow saving whenever for regular difficulty modes, and save-on-quit for permadeath modes.

Next thing I'll probably work on is stairs and multiple-block-height rooms (which is already working, just disabled)

I love the way you've taken very old-school Dungeon Master style gameplay and subtly added a few modern tweaks like freedom of the camera, without taking it too far and destroying what it is. I'm looking forward to playing when this game is finished!

Keycode doors and regular door open/close buttonsAll doors now have controls associated with them. These currently come in regular and keycode flavors, but I intend to add more. Keycode doors are fully functional and require a code to open. The code required will either be dropped by an enemy on the level, or be found in a container. I may also experiment with scrawling codes on walls - but this may be easily missed by players. Once keycode doors are opened, they are able to be open/closed at will without re-entering the code (to allow for escapes/crushing enemies).

Rooms can have arbitrary sizeSince the early days of development, I always intended the game to have large rooms with high ceilings, or to be able to walk on suspended walkways high above things like roaring hyperspace engines. The engine supports these huge rooms, but the dungeon digger currently only digs 2x high rooms. More complex arrangements will be coming soon.

Main Menu and SavegamesDungeons and player progress can now be saved from the ingame pause menu, and resumed from the main menu. Eventually I will add hardcore/permadeath modes where saving is only permissable on exiting the game. Regular game modes will be allowed to save anywhere.

Thank you for the encouraging comments on the artistic direction. I have considered possibly finding an artist for either improving on the 2d elements, or going full 3d - but maybe I'll keep exploring the current direction for now.

Now I'm wondering whether to stay the course and keep creating something that could possibly be very similar - or to try to strike out in a different direction, maybe explore the roguelike domain a little more.